June 20, 2026
A Friend of Mine Is Still Here.
A friend of mine is still here.
That sentence should not feel remarkable, but lately it does.
For a long time he lived with thoughts that wanted to convince him that the world would continue just fine without him. That his absence would be manageable. That the space he occupied in other people’s lives was smaller than it really was.
Those thoughts are persuasive because they speak in the voice of certainty.
They tell a person that they are a burden.
That they are forgettable.
That they are already halfway gone.
Today he is alive. He is fighting. He is taking medications that leave him exhausted. He is learning how to carry a mind that has not always been kind to him. Some days that fight is invisible to everyone except him.
And yet it may be the bravest thing I have ever witnessed.
One of the cruelest things about despair is that it narrows a person’s vision until they can no longer see their own shape in the lives around them. They cannot see the empty chair. The unanswered text. The birthday that arrives differently. The joke that no one else knows how to tell. The particular way they enter a room and change its weather.
They cannot see what others would lose.
The tragedy is not only that they hurt.
The tragedy is that they begin to believe they do not matter.
But they do.
God, they do!
The older I get, the less I am impressed by grand achievements and the more I am moved by ordinary presence. The friend who calls. The friend who listens. The friend who sends a ridiculous meme at exactly the right moment. The friend who stays.
We imagine people remember us for our milestones.
Mostly they remember our nearness.
They remember how safe they felt around us.
They remember laughing until they couldn’t breathe.
They remember being understood.
I wrote the poem below because I wanted to say something to my friend that depression could not interrupt. Something that might survive the noise. Something that might remind him that while he was busy cataloging his flaws, there were people quietly loving him for reasons he could not see.
Maybe someone else needs to hear it too.
Maybe someone reading this has forgotten that their life has become woven into other lives in a thousand invisible ways.
Maybe someone reading this believes they would not be missed.
They are wrong.
And I hope they stay long enough to discover just how wrong they are.
Feel free to share this with someone you know who might be going through the same.
What They Miss
Even the friends you’ve drifted from,
the ones whose faces you only see now in the small lit window of a phone.
They miss you.
Not the grand version of you.
The ordinary one.
The long talks that wandered into the dark and
didn’t care what time it was.
The goofing around.
The stupid jokes that were never actually funny,
which was exactly what made them funny.
What wouldn’t they give to be where you are right now,
in this plain, unrepeatable morning,
which you might be tempted to call nothing special.
They miss the way you laugh.
They even miss, though they’d never say it,
the particular smell of you —
the way a person’s nearness has a weather all its own.
So the next time you stand in front of the mirror
and find only the things you’d change, stop.
Know that you are being admired from somewhere you can’t see.
Know that I am looking too,
and that I am loving you back.
Yes, you!
Exactly as you are this morning,
with your unbrushed hair
and your whole astonishing life still ahead of you.
Originally published on Substack. ← Back to all articles